Pro-torture president prepares place in history

Pundit David Broder’s famous comment on Bill Clinton’s time in the White House was that “he trashed the place ... and it wasn’t his place.”
Bush would prefer his presidency have a better epitaph.
A list of talking points handed out to his staff recently suggests that in discussing the administration, staffers emphasize that he “kept the American people safe,” boosted the economy and “maintained the honor and the dignity of his office.”
Honor. Dignity. Applied to Bush, the words would be funny — if they weren’t so offensive.
This is the “honorable” president who claims the power to imprison American citizens at will for no reason other than “Because I said so.” Whose administration has admitted breaking the law in order to spy on American citizens. The president who in 2002 signed off on his cabinet’s decisions about which torture techniques to use on al-Qaida prisoners.
This is the administration that claimed torture wasn’t torture unless it equaled the pain of severe organ failure, the torturer knew how bad the pain was and if causing pain was the primary purpose (combined, that’s enough loopholes to drive a Humvee through).
This is the president who fought to make torture by the CIA legal, while redefining it as “harsh interrogation.” Who adopted techniques originally used by the USSR to force confessions out of people. The president who has undermined laws against torture to the point one U.S. official said this year he couldn’t think of any legal objection to Iran waterboarding American soldiers.
This is the president who claims he has the legal authority to override any laws, Constitutional rules or treaties that tell him he can’t do what he wants. No wonder Bush and his acolytes can keep claiming all their actions are legal without seeing their noses grow.
This is the president who sacrificed 4,000 American lives, many times that number of Iraqis and plunged the government trillions of dollars in debt in order to fight a war against someone who wasn’t a threat. This is the administration that has locked up and refused to release people it acknowledges are innocent. A government that has tortured innocent people, which is about as dishonorable as you can get.
Bush, who has repeatedly said that he’s made almost no mistakes as president, sees his tenure differently. Recently he said his biggest regret was “the intelligence failure in Iraq ... a lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein ... I wish the intelligence had been different.”
In other words, Bush’s big regret isn’t anything he did — endorsing torture, sending in too few troops to occupy Iraq, ignoring the defectors who said Saddam didn’t have WMD programs — but what someone else did. Likewise, he talks about “a lot of people” who pushed for the invasion as if he weren’t one of them. As if he hadn’t warned us it was too dangerous to wait. As if he hadn’t once considered tricking Saddam into shooting at a U.N. plane to give us an excuse to go in (as revealed in the transcript of a 2003 meeting with Britain’s Prime Minister Blair).
Then there’s Condoleeza Rice, who said this month that the Iraq war was “a strategic triumph, not just for the Bush administration, but for America.” By what logic is an unnecessary war that has tied down and exhausted our military, pushed our country’s budget into the red and has actually inspired more new terrorists and insurgents than we’ve killed a strategic triumph?
I know Bush will be gone in a month, but we can’t afford to forget what a dreadful president he was. Otherwise we might be fooled when the right wing starts airbrushing over how horrendous conservative policies turned out to be in practice.
If Iraq eventually pulls itself together, for instance, the right wing will parade Bush and other talking heads proclaiming how this proves he was right all along, and pretending any success is due to Bush, rather than in spite of him.
The media are already at work with the airbrush, claiming that Bush staffers who signed off on lawbreaking and endorsed torture were just innocent bureaucratic bystanders who should have important posts in Obama’s administration — and certainly shouldn’t be investigated or charged for breaking the law.
If we don’t see through the airbrushing, sooner or later it’ll all happen again. America can’t afford that.
Bush and his cabinet not only “trashed the place,” they trashed the Constitution, the economy, the law and America’s moral standing. If the past eight years are how Bush and his supporters define honor and dignity, give me a dishonorable president covered in shame.